Today we have released a service pack for Expression Encoder 4 that includes some new features and a bunch of bug fixes.  Here is a list of the new features we have added:

 

  • GPU encoding - If you have an NVIDIA CUDA-accelerated GPU board in your system, you can now take advantage of the additional processors to speed up encoding time or squeeze more live streams into your broadcasts.  Check out Eric Juteau's white paper for all the details.
  • Screen capture as a live source - Now you can select the screen as a device in Live projects to stream or archive.  
  • Live templates - Before if you wanted to use the Expression Encoder templates, you needed to hand edit the template to point to your live source.  Now you can generate the template directly from the Live project and we will hook up all the links.  The workflow is slightly different than on-demand templates.  Since these templates usually need to be live before you start broadcasting, you will need to generate the files manually beforehand.  Once you have selected your output type, the Generate button will enable on the Templates panel where you can manually create the files or upload them to a WebDAV enabled server.  If the panel doesn't appear after upgrade, you can find it on the Windows menu.
  • Live Push/Pull - Now you can broadcast and publish to a Windows Media Services publish point at the same time.
  • Improved De-interlacing Options - We have added a new de-interlacing option called 'Selective Blend' which provides a higher quality picture without the high CPU requirements of Pixel Adaptive.  We have also exposed this and the other de-interlacing options in live.
  • Import script commands - Both in live (no timing) and on-demand, you can now import multiple captioning formats (ISMT, DFXP, SRT, XML, SAMI, SUB, TXT) to the Script Command panel.  This allows you to pre-propagate your captions in live from a script or do some basic editing of your scripts before encoding.  If you do not have a caption file for you encode or broadcast, you can now easily create a 'return-delimited' TXT file with your captions to import in either project type as well.
  • DRM Content Key - If you PlayReady license server supports Content Key encryption, we now allow you to specify this key instead of a Key Seed to enable individual keys per item.
  • HE-AAC - We have added both Version 1 and Version 2 of the HE-AAC codec to allow encoding for supported devices.
  • New Windows Phone 7 presets - Now that the WIndows Phone 7 is out (they rock!), we have created presets to enable direct playback (WMV, MP4) or creating video to use in a Smooth Streaming application using the Silverlight Media Framework phone template.

 

Check it out and let us know what you think!  Thanks

 

Jamie